Emily Happened . . .

This is something I wrote on my facebook account:

I have something I am finally prepared to share with all of you—with those of you that knew Emily and those of you who are wondering who all of these references on my facebook are about. It is a story that is still in the telling. I have yet to learn the end. And as my friend Lindsey once said, quoting Robert Frost, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.” If that is the case, prepare to be balling your eyes out--I have been.

As some of you know, I grew up on a farm in the north eastern corner of Texas. Late in the summer of 2001, my mom heard a whisper from the Still Small Voice, saying, “You are about to become part of the Bigger Church. Broaden your horizons.” She didn’t know what it meant, so she just held it with her. Then Tuesday, September 11th 2001 knocked the world to its knees. After spending fourteen hours that day in front of the television in shock and horror, we were told from the pulpit that the attack on our nation was judgement from God for the sins of this country. And in the string of events that followed that statement, my own personal world, or rather my corner of it, came crashing down around my ears as we left the church and charted new territories. I was fifteen years old, awkward, chubby, and painfully self-concious, but I was stepping out into a whole new world. It’s amazing how strange those words sound considering how claustrophobic I felt at becoming so isolated so quickly, but the scope of our life was really broadening, not closing in. Our life turned online in a desparate attempt to maintain contact with the outside world.

That was the beginning of Emily.

Three of my brothers and I started taking highschool classes on an online Christian school called The Potter’s School. David, the youngest of the first half of the family, took his classes but didn’t socialize much. Myself, the oldest of the second half of the family, and my younger brothers, Taylor and Micah, took to the online community like ducks to water. Taylor became an editor for the school newspaper. I started a creative writing and critique group on the forum. Micah hung out in chat with the kids quite a bit, and all of us made a bunch of friends. Well, here I am twenty-one, five years after taking my first class on TPS and two years since graduating from it, and I am still doing the same thing I ever was--hanging out with the kids, discussing and debating big thoughts with passion and gusto, writing and critiquing stories, looking at photos, fooling around, and building friendships by mutually wasting time . . . or so I occassionally thought. Today I am off the farm, not nearly so isolated, but still find that the friendships that sprouted and began to grow on that forum to be among the ones I cherish most. Five years of watching myself grow up in the reflection of their eyes and seeing them change and yet stay beautifully the same on the other side of my computer screen as my fingers flew across the keys in a vain attempt to keep up . . . after a while we might as well be spending every afternoon on each other’s couches—we had just as much a bond.

I look back now with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and I thank God for every day that I stayed. I am a good three years older than the oldest kids there, having watched my graduating class, the one after me, and the one after that slowly dissapear into “real life,” seldom if ever to be heard from again. I guess in a weird way, I am grateful that the kids I hit it off with in my first few years were freshmans or younger, giving me reason to stick around to meet the kids that joined the school the same year I graduated. I know now that I could have spared myself a lot of heartache had I slowly drifted away and by that skipped this last, hellish two weeks—but never. Had I done that, I would have missed out on Emily completely, and instead of introducing you to her someday when we meet on the other side, my long-lost highschool buddies would be introducing me to a young woman I would never have realized I NEEDED to know.

Sunday morning, September 28th, I got the news that Micah had been up with all night. My mom told me that she had found him asleep on the living room floor beside his laptop computer at 5:00 a.m., which was when she learned the news. One of the girls on the forum had died. For some reason I may never know, I asked “how” before I asked “who.” I don’t know why. Some foreknowledge that on some, painful level the answer to that question would be harder to accept than the answer to the other? I don’t even know if that is true. How do you measure the weight of grief or even where it comes from? My mom answered with a grave, serious face, “She was killed. They don’t have all the details. She was out for a walk.” I felt the wind squeezed out of me. My mind went blank. For a single moment as long as eternity, panic welled up in me as I thought through every possibility. In that moment, I had lost every one of the kids that had come to mean so much to me, but I could not ask the question. As soon as I did, regardless of the answer, I would have lost the one that meant the most.

Emily.

My mind must have been short circeting. In a single moment I could not quite remember who she was and yet was flooded with memories. I remembered, which is more than I can say for most of my friends from TPS, the very first time I really met her: a little over a year ago. Micah had pushed me into one computer chair as he took the other. He wanted me to meet his friends on chat. I knew a few of them already--most of them infact--and Emily and I had even seen each other around the forum, but she didn’t know before that moment my connection to Micah or “belly button lint,” as she liked to call him for some reason neither of us will ever understand. She dove into an escapade of secret-sharing, as she divulged information that all of the others present already knew, but the “big sister” wasn’t supposed to know. To her dissapointment, the information wasn’t so much the surprise to me as the fact that she knew it. It was something that Micah never talked to ANYONE about—not even me—but he’d shared it there in chat with her long before. That blush-inducing moment for Micah actually lead us to find a wonderful place for he and I to have real heart-to-hearts: over private chat. We could sit side by side at separate computers and share things that we couldn’t bring ourselves to say to the other’s face. That was the first, of many times, Emily brought me closer to another soul . . . I suspect, though she’s gone, I have yet to experience the last.

I hung out with her in chat several other times, bumping into her in the forum as well, and always laughing when I ran across a post with Emily’s name on it with a P.S. on the bottom reading something to the gist of, “This is actually Josh, her brother, posting under his ‘psuedo-Emi’ by mistake.” Her account profile made me laugh and cry the morning I learned of her death and opened it to send her a goodbye over private message: “any odd occurrences in my avatar, title, and sig tend to occur from my brother hacking my account—please tell me if you notice, because I usually don’t.” Even after her death, she’s EVERYWHERE. That girl was so darn proud of her status as the lead poster, and boy was she ever—with or without “psuedo-Emi.”

I tried to go to work that morning. I went in, filled out my goal card with my manager, and then slumped down into a chair near the lobby, trying not to loose it or vomit when someone offered me a breakfast bar. I thought I was going to be able to suck it up and make it through my shift, but as soon as I saw my sister walk through the front door, I melted into a puddle of tears on the floor, and the simple news that I had lost a friend to murder gave me the day off. I got in my car and numbly drove for a while along Tyler Loop 323. I stepped on the gas for the green light, on the break for the red light, and drove with the windows rolled down. I had nowhere to go, but I needed to drive there. Finally, I turned around and headed back into town. When I stopped my car outside of Barnes and Noble, I blessed my messy habits as I discovered my journal still in the backseat from a trip I’d taken a couple of weeks before back Home, the farm where I’d grown up.

So there I sat alone at an empty table for two, writing anything and everything that flitted through my mind. Slowly, a wave of disbelief started to mount in me. When it had built to a tide, I gathered up my things and rushed home. As I darted up the stairs of my mother’s appartment, I harbored the fleeting, comforting belief that it had all been a prank. We’d had our share of April Fools pranks in the past, not all of which had QUITE landed on April Fools. I couldn’t remember that Emily or Josh had been in on any of them, but Emily had liked a good joke, though through my hope that that was all it was, I knew I was going to seriously kick her butt if my hope was true! I figured that if the chatroom vigil through the long night hadn’t brought her around, my tearful goodbye letter in her Inbox would do the trick. Honestly, whoever said ignorance is bliss didn’t know the sheer wonder of stubborn disbelief. I unlocked the front door, made a dash for the computer, logged in to chat, and the illusion was shattered. No appology. No Emily. Just a chatroom full of crying kids spread clear from Washington, to Kansas, to New Jersey, to Korea.

Emily was gone.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, the kids continued to join the chatroom that was quickly becoming an online wake between kids whose hearts were joined across state lines, nation’s boarders, and even oceans—now stretching all the way to heaven. We sat together and shook. We shared links to a few articles that had picked up the story, giving us details we hadn’t had before, but still remaining silent as to “the victim’s” name. Josh had asked us to keep the matter private and try to deflect media attention. No blog posts, no public foruming, no facebook updating. Because of the lack of identifying features in the news articles, a few of the kids refused to believe it was Emily. Slowly, with horror, we traced the growing knowledge of the newspapers as they first found her father’s blog, photos of Em, and even our school newspaper’s student spotlight from June 2007, and we began getting more information as to what had happened as they gathered information from us regarding who she was.

Denial was over.

We couldn’t bury our heads anymore. We had been robbed of a heart that had touched each of ours so deeply, and nothing could ever make it okay. The next stages of grief swept over us. We cried. Sharing stories. Laughing at Emily’s sense of humor through our tears. Then rage hit us as we started thinking about the man that still walked free as examiners were determining the “cause of death” of our friend. I had sent a private message to my friend, Grace, at the beginning of the day, warning her that her job as forum moderator was about to get harder, as I expected tempers would flare in our grief. I guess I hadn’t assumed it would be MY temper. I called out for capital punishment, falling back on the good ol’boy attitude of my home state and wishing all of this hadn’t taken place in Canada, so we could inflict the death penalty. John, our friend in Korea who was up in the middle of the night his time, told me to stop and think—would Emily want us to be thinking all of this right now? I wanted to tell him I didn’t care; she wasn’t here to correct me, and as the thought sunk in, restraining my fingers from speaking it out loud, I wanted to cry.

John finally talked me down, and I melted again into the pain that had fueled my anger, and started appologizing profusely, realizing that regardless of if Emily were here to tell me to change my focus, it wasn’t what any of us needed to be thinking about right then. As I settled back down and started to cry, they all gathered around me, and it was like we were sharing a group hug, crying on each other’s shoulders--wishing they were tangible. We fell to laughing about our memories, picturing Emily on the other side of Glory. “You know,” John said. “I can just picture her realizing she’s in heaven, looking back at the rest of us and saying, ‘YES! I got here first!” We all laughed through our tears, grateful we had each other. We couldn’t quite shake the feeling, though, that Emily should be there with us. For such an important moment in the life of our shared friendships and the forum where she had lived with us, she should be here and her absense was startling.

As the end of that long, aweful day came upon us, many of us had cooled from wild grief and bouts of rage into a dry, sullen ache. Watching news footage from Alberta—showing her community and the spot where she had died . . . for some it was harder, for me it whispered a closure to the day. The details we were given as to how she was killed calmed the racing images in my head of every possibility into one, monotonous image that played over and over again, but at least I knew more of what had really happened. I realized as I went to bed that, while I had reminded the others all day that they had to eat, aside from a few random things throughout the day, I hadn’t eaten all day. I couldn’t. I was sick to my stomache, and the thought of putting food in my mouth brought up a wave of nausea. I went to bed and tried to sleep.

Over the next few days, the grief and shock wore on. I never felt fully awake nor ever really asleep. It was like walking through a dream while wakeful. Almost like sleeping with your eyes open--you don’t realize you’re doing it until someone points out the light in your pupils is gone. I discovered so few people that could relate or even handle my grief, and tucked away among their ranks, I found a few that could listen to anything and everything I needed to say. I have learned that angels are everywhere—even heavy-drinking, hard-living, atheist ones. Just a few days ago, as a wave of grief washed over me and I slumped to the floor of the drink station in the restaurant where I work, one of the guys got down on the floor with me, to talk, and to listen. He had asked me several days before what was wrong. “I lost a friend to murder too,” he had said. “This too shall pass,” he quoted with a knowing look in his eye.

Yet over the course of th at first week, I felt, very distinctly, a sharp separation between “us” and “them,” those who had known Emily, and those who hadn’t. We cried, we remembered, we reminded each other to eat. We dealt with the pain of having wasted time with her. Slowly, I came to realize that, though I had had so little, I had been given all the time I needed. God knew I NEEDED to know her, and I hadn’t missed out on anything I had been intended to have with her. As one of the girls said, “God knew how much loss each of us could handle.” So I worked during the day, comforted by the knowledge that when I got home, I could sit back down to chat, or curl up in a ball with the phone to my ear—knowing that while I walked through my day, as a washed out girl that no longer trusted mascara, there were others just like me all around the world.

I began to feel the universality of the Church. My horizons were broadening. Just as Josh and his family were receiving letters and flowers coming clear from Shri Lanka, I was feeling bound and united with Christians living all over the world. As we sat in the chatroom day after day, we began to share the striking sense of heaven that we had never had before. It was REAL--so very, very real to so many of us. One of the girls told me over private chat, “I can see heaven now . . . now that someone I know is there.” Another shared with me over the phone, “If God took me tommorow, I would be okay with it,” and I understood. It’s not that we wanted to die or were in despair. It was that we were, and are, at peace with God—completely.

Last Saturday was a hard day for all of us, being the one week anaversary of Emily’s death. After work and school almost all of us gathered back together in chat for a special night. Grace had asked our school administrator to come and speak with us, to answer any questions we had after loosing Emily. I was INTENSELY uncomfortable with the invitation. Our forum isn’t exactly the “official” forum for the school. Several years before, the free-thinkers of the school had separated onto a knock off forum, which had received a fair amount of hostility from the school’s administrator. (I marvel daily how I somehow manage to never be the new kid and always be the rebel.) I felt hugely territorial of our space, but I knew that Grace had been going through a lot and, in the midst of her own grief, had had to continue in the role of “Forum Mommy” and everything that entailed, so I decided I would not opose Mr. G. coming—if she needed to hand the reigns over for a while, I would support her in that. I would go because of Emily, because of the other kids, and for Grace--even though I didn’t much care what he had to say. My deepest fear was that he would come in, not having known Emily as we had, and turn this into a theological dissertation or at the very least say something meaningless and churchy like, “Emily wouldn’t want us to be sad—she’s in a better place.” What we received from him that night . . . I could not have anticipated. It was another instance in which Emily has brought people together.

His first words as he came into chat, our names lining the sidebar as if we were standing with locked arms, were, “I am so humbled and honoured to be here.” He said he had not expected the invitation to speak to us. He said that before joining us in chat, Grace had given him access to view our forum, all of the memorials we had set up and the tributes we had written, and the avatars and signitures that had simltaneously been changed to photos of Emily or quotes she had left behind. “Seeing all of this,” he said in shock. “I realize what you all lost, what this place meant to Emily.” He let us talk for much of the time, asking us leading questions and then letting us answer. We talked about who Emily had been, what she had meant to us. We talked about the hardest things about loosing her. It was a special moment, since many of us hadn’t had the courage, or perhaps had been so busy trying to comfort each other, that we hadn’t shared with each other the thing that was the hardest. I had voiced it to Grace, and she to me, that we had the image of Emily’s death playing over, and over, and over in our heads. We all said the hardest thing was knowing that Emily was alone in that final moment. And then he said the words that could have come from God Himself, they have been so comforting to each of us. I think they will be in our hearts forever.

God grieves Emily even more than we do—and she WASN’T alone.

One of the girls said something about Him being at her side through it all, and Mr. G. corrected her. Not at Emily’s side, but ACTIVELY INVOLVED. I am so grateful to him for bringing us to that realization. I talked to several of the others after Mr. G. left, and we were all floored by the realization that the thought had never occurred to any of us. We had seen her in our minds alone, afraid, in pain—and no one came. And now, the picture I hold in my head of that moment is the struggle, the rope around her neck, the man infront of her—and God standing behind her, her leaning back against Him; Him holding on tight in a strong embrace from behind; Him stroking her hair, crying, whispering in her ear, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” And then finally, “Okay . . . now it’s time to go home.”

All of you reading this have known me a long time. You’ve either known me from infancy, or young childhood, some grew up with me . . . I tell you truthfully, I have never felt God so close before. Despite my grief that still comes in wild, uncontrollable surges, I feel His presence closer. I have often felt God with me in the past—but never standing at my elbow, never in the passanger seat of my car as I drive. One tribute to Emily read, “She walked with God until it came time for Him to carry her Home.” I have never known what it meant—what it TRULY meant--to walk with God, never read it and understood it as anything more than poetry. Now . . . I feel it. I understand. I am overwhelmed by His presence. As I sob, as I cry out for help in this grief, as I reach out to others for companionship as I mourn, as I am weighed down by the burden of Emily’s death, I feel Him all around me. I see Him everywhere. I have no fear. And in taking one day at a time, I find what a true marvel each day is. Even in moments in which I am at an utter loss and wish I could just pull the plug and end the world right now, I am aware of eternity. I am aware that if I live to be ninety-one . . . that is still only seventy years. Such a short time before we are all together, and not just with Em, but everyone I ache for. Heaven feels so real.

It seems so strange to me . . . Emily seemed to understand all of this. Reading over things she wrote to hers and my mutual friends in the week before she died, notes on how to put God first, quizzes about what she believed, her final words to another friend the morning of the day she died, “I’m praying for you” . . . she seemed to get it, and, oh, I wish I could talk to her about it all. There are so few in this world that seem to TRULY understand the boundlessness I feel about life and eternity, the intimacy I feel with God. And yet I am aware of the irony that I have this—all this—as a result of loosing her. If we could hit a rewind button and I had the chance I had then . . . I wouldn’t be able to talk to her about all of this. I understand now what it means for God to work all things together for good. It’s not that it’s “worth it.” Honestly, I would give it all back in a heartbeat. I would return to my cynicism about religion, my lack of use for Scripture, return to the way my friendships were then, my inclination to harbor enemies—storming off from the computer when Alan said the “wrong thing,” while muttering about “highschooler’s immaturity” and missing my own. I so wish I could go back to being diffecult, go back to having enemies over stupid things, go back to hostility towared Mr. G., go back to everything I was before . . . if it meant somehow none of this could have happened. Yet as I recognize my own preferences, I recognize the good God has worked anyway out of a situation I so desparately wish could be changed. But it can’t. Instead of thinking fondly of Grace, I call her when I am in tears. Instead of growling at the thought of Alan’s views on politics and religion, I think of him as a friend. Instead of being afraid, being in a race against time, being distant to my Heart and His calling . . . I am who I didn’t know I wanted to be.

Emily happened.